THERE’S A DEAL on the detainee treatment dispute. Via blogger-spam from the White House, there’s a release on the substance in the “extended entry” area. Click “read more” to read it. Here’s a news story on the deal, too. Also, there’s lots of commentary at The Corner.

UPDATE: Marty Lederman thinks the Bush Administration rolled its critics, and is unhappy. Dan Riehl thinks the same thing, and is happy.

And Atrios comments: “McCain sold out the country and the Democrats look like crap.”

Tom Maguire sees Atrios’ point: “Since Dems have been hiding behind St. John on this issue, they will have a hard time announcing at this late date that McCain lacks the integrity and judgment to be trusted.” It’s almost as if McCain and the White House suckered them or something.

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HOT RECORDERS FOR COOL PODCASTS: Larry Magid reviews three portable digital recorders, and likes the Edirol R-09 best. My review of the Edirol for Gizmodo is here.

Also, here’s my review of the cheaper, but entirely adequate, Olympus DM-20.

HUGO CHAVEZ and his friends. Tom Harkin?

A SPACE SCOOP LIVEBLOGGED FROM RAND SIMBERG:

Bigelow announced at lunch that he will be putting up a three-person space station in late 2009 or early 2010, about fifty percent bigger than an ISS module. He is putting up a destination in hopes that the transportation will come along (and in order to spur the transportation providers). Station will last for several years. Will be executing contracts in 2008 for transportation contracts to Sundancer. Expects between four and eight trips (people and cargo) per year, after six-month shakedown. Then trips will commence whenever transportation becomes available. 2012 will see the launch of another module providing 500 cubic meters of habitable volume. Will support sixteen launches a year for full utilization (again, cargo and people). Minimum three-week stay, but market limited at ten million, so wants to establish private astronaut program for other nations (this is not news). Make sixty instead of eleven countries with an astronaut corps. Could represent on the order of a billion a year in revenue. Launch estimates from fifty to a hundred million per flight. About time to take human spaceflight from the exclusive domain of governments. Will be changing that in the next half decade.

He also announced that he and Lockmart have a joint agreement to study what it will take to human rate the Atlas V for commercial passenger transport.

Read the whole thing.

CATHY SEIPP ON COLLEGE TODAY:

One of the biggest changes, by the way, between college now and then is that Maia already has dozens of new friends and aqaintances through Facebook, some of whom she’s already met in person here in L.A. this summer. This is in stark contrast to my first year at UCLA almost 30 years ago, where in the pre-Internet days it really was very hard entering a giant university not knowing anyone.

Ah, technology.

DON SURBER looks at election fraud and its supporters. As I’ve noted, it makes no sense to go on about untrustworthy voting machines while opposing efforts to fix the voter registration and identification process. Garbage in, garbage out.

DAVID BERNSTEIN:

Who in a position of authority at Columbia would daft enough to invite Holocaust denier / genocidal maniac / most notorious and powerful anti-Semite of the current age / etc. Ahmadinejad (who, by the way, I saw on t.v. claiming today claiming that the 35,000 people who protested his speech at the U.N. were actually one hundred paid Zionist stooges) to speak?

Columbia, however, seems to have reconsidered.

BRINK LINDSEY looks at people who are poor-mouthing prosperity.

DEMOCRATIC LEADERS took their smart pills today.

Some pundits, not so much.

UPDATE: Apparently, the smart pills are in short supply. And yes, I realize that Yglesias was goofing, as was I. These people, alas, seem to be entirely serious.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More shortages.

MORE: Is one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter? Not so much. But one man’s “sweet hipster style” is another man’s “aging high school chemistry teacher.” And when “another man” is The Manolo, I know which side I come down on . . . .

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Over at TPM Muckraker, Justin Rood notes that a Democratic victory in the House elections won’t do much to end pork and corruption:

Washington has witnessed a storm of “pay-to-play” corruption scandals in Congress over the last year, both admitted and alleged. And on the campaign trail congressional Democrats are charging the GOP with creating a “culture of corruption” on their watch. Yet if they win, they are poised to hand a much-abused spending post to a Democrat with a long reputation for porkbarrel politics and “back room” deals.

If the Dems take control of the House in November, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), now lauded by Democratic activists for his tough stand on Iraq, is poised to retake the helm of an appropriations panel charged with spending hundreds of billions of dollars on defense-related projects, which he last chaired in the early 1990s. He may even ascend to be Majority Leader in a Democratically controlled House.

Yet Murtha — who U.S. News and World Report once called “one of Capitol Hill’s most accomplished masters at the art of pork” — presides over a tightly connected network of favored lobbyists, former staffers and major campaign contributors that bears a striking resemblance to those maintained by some of the tarnished Republicans he would likely replace.

Read the whole thing, which is full of interesting specifics. This is a bipartisan issue, as the “culture of corruption” is not the culture of a party, but the culture of a political class.

I HAVEN’T DONE MUCH MOWER-BLOGGING in quite a while, but here’s a post on “Extreme Mowing” for anyone who’s feeling lawncare-deprived.

And, of course, who could forget this classic?

NICK GILLESPIE: “Please don’t confuse the voters with facts.”

Apparently, Adam Nagourney is following that advice. Tom Maguire offers further Nagourney-roasting.

ANOTHER blog-related firing.

Much more here.

MORE ON THE POPE AND ISLAM, from Michael Novak.

IN THE MAIL: Alice Randall’s new book, My Country Roots: The Ultimate MP3 Guide to America’s Original Outsider Music. Looks pretty cool.

LOSING ANBAR? Bill Roggio writes:

I’ve received plenty of questions about the intelligence report that claims Anbar province has been lost. I’ve talked to several sources in the military and intelligence who have actually seen the entire report (and not been fed excerpts). They are angry over the media’s characterization of the report. Basically, the report indicated that the situation in Ramadi is dire, and that the political situation in Anbar as a whole as a result is in danger because of this.

Ramadi has been a problem for some time, but the major problem there has been the Iraqi government’s lack ofpolitical will to act over the course of the last year. Even ceding the security situation to the tribes is a form of passing the problem on to the locals.

Since my sources were unwilling to go on the record, I chose not to address this directly. If the military community is unwilling to step up to the plate and defend itself, except in vague terms, about the situation in Ramadi then they will have to deal with the backlash of this decision. Good work has been and continues to be done in Anbar. The military has a problem with public affairs, plain and simple, and fails to realize that the impact on remaining silent on this report far outweighs the need to keep the information classified.

It’s an information war, too. Meanwhile, another province is being turned over to Iraqi military control

Also, StrategyPage looks at the declining fortunes of the Taliban.

GAYS WHO WANT TO SERVE IN THE MILITARY: Seems admirable to me. Why not let ’em? (Via Ed Cone.)

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT:

But still, you can feel the Western brain cells being rubbed together. . . . The idea that the West’s response to the Islamic challenge will only ever consist of the first hasty and opposed responses to 9/11, which were entirely what people already thought – “We all ought to get along better”, “We are provoking them”, “They must become more democratic”, and so on – is very foolish. The West – a vague label I know but it will serve – is the most formidable civilisation that the world has yet seen. It has faced down several recent and major challenges to its hegemony, and it will face down this one, I think, with whatever combination of sweet reason and cataclysmic brutality turns out to be necessary to get the job done. This challenge now seems bigger than the earlier ones. But they always do at the time, don’t they?

Indeed. Plus, “Be not afraid:”

The question that keeps popping in my mind – after the response to the Danish cartoons and now after Pope Benedict’s recent comments – is: why are we so afraid?

Culturally and religiously we are on the defensive in this War on Terror. And it makes no sense to me. We accept immoral expressions of outrage by Muslims across the world and yet fail to have any of our own justified moral indignation at their actions. Instead we apologize for causing their reactions. Perhaps I should apologize to my four year old for his little temper tantrum this morning and for the time he slugged his sister in the face with a toy.

We hold the high ground – we believe in individual liberty, we believe in religious tolerance, we believe in women’s rights, we believe in a narrow window for the just use of war – and we should not be afraid to stand tall and to express our outrage at the insane reactions we are seeing across the Muslim world. In fact their actions prove the point made previously in Danish cartoons and the quote from Pope Benedict. It is all well and good to be sensitive but it is quite another thing when Muslims actually manifest what we criticize. It is quite another thing when there is lack of reciprocity in Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians. They have yet to practice what they preach.

Read the whole thing.